This is the teaching of the great sages and seers of all the ages: work out your own salvation. Exercise the powers within you with which you are endowed. Hearken: does the fact that men are bewildered and often troubled with questions of conscience signify that we have been left without guidance? Don't you see that that very fact is a call to us by nature to exercise the powers latent within us! By the exercise of judgment and discrimination, judgment and discrimination grow stronger. If we do not exercise our own god-like right of spiritual and intellectual judgment we grow weaker and weaker. It is by this exercise that we evolve, bring forth ever more the god-like powers within us.
Look at the great, the magnificent examples of human spirituality and genius with which the annals of human history are builded. These are indeed glorious and give us courage and show us how, since others have attained, so may we. These are sign-posts along that mystic path leading to the Mountains of the Spirit. But it is we ourselves who must tread that path, and we ourselves who must make our own judgments and abide by them. Just there is their great beauty. As ye sow, ye shall reap. Not something else than what you have sown. Think what this means. When men become convinced of this, their judgment will be broadened, they won't leap to points of conclusion, they will not lean negatively on others and thereby weaken their own judgment because no call is made upon it. They will accept the magnificent examples of human history as encouragements. "What he has done as a Son of Man, that also may I do by exercising within me the same powers that that grand figure of human history exercised." Their lives are a perennial example for us. But it is we ourselves who must grow, and by exercising our powers we do grow; and with each exercise the discrimination becomes more keen, the judgment be comes more sure, the light brighter. Then when the test comes we know which way to go.